What is the community mission, goals and antagonist?
In the nutshell, a community is a way to solve some social problem that is otherwise difficult or impossible to solve. The mission of a community is a short description of a proposed solution to that problem. The mission explains “what” a community does and “why” people should join it. People who are concerned with the social problem being solved and who believe that the proposed solution (the mission) is the best approach to solve it will join the community.
The mission of a community is the central element. Any community begins with a mission statement and ends once the mission has been achieved.
The mission is something that is waiting for us far beyond the horizon. To stay on track, we need goals—specific milestones that bring us closer to our mission one step at the time. Goals unite users and make them push in the same direction together. Mission creates a shared identity and goals set a universal measurement system that allows the users to judge on any issue that arises on the way.
Social problems, like any other high level concepts, are difficult to explain and understand. One way to make the problem you’re solving more tangible is to find an antagonist, company, project, or whatever else that is currently benefiting the most from the existence of the problem. You can define your community as something that is opposed to the antagonist and measure your progress towards your mission by over performing the antagonist. At an early stage, when many aspects of the community have not yet been defined, having an antagonist will help the community manager find the first users and the users to find a consensus on the choice of initiatives.
This is a fragment of a draft of the book “Lessons Learned While Working On Stack Overflow”. Read the full book on kindle or the paperback version.